HB Reavis to crown £250m Elizabeth House

London & Regional and Chelsfield have agreed a deal to sell Elizabeth House, SE1, to HB Reavis for more than £250m, EG can reveal.

The 1.4m sq ft office-led development on the South Bank, formally known as One Waterloo, is one of the most high-profile in London.

It neighbours Waterloo Station, will overlook The River Thames and is anticipated to have an end value close to £1.3bn.

The deal will see the partners make a substantial profit on the highly complex site that they bought in 2010 from P&O Developments for £85m.

The sales process, led by London & Regional, attracted interest from around eight bidders.

Sources close to the deal said competition was even greater than anticipated when a sale was first considered last summer and the extent of the appetite from investors to take on development risk was a strong sign of confidence in both the South Bank and broader London market.

Once completed the David Chipperfield Architects-designed scheme at 39 York Road, SE1, will be made up of two main buildings, one two-part building of 29 and 14 storeys and another of 11-storeys. As well as offices it will include 142 flats.

The development of the site has been long-anticipated. P&O first submitted plans for the development in 2004 and after a series of rejections, call ins, appeals and protests and a final planning hurdle was cleared in 2015.

The acquisition will bring about the Slovakian developer and investor’s most ambitious London project to date. The company first entered the London market four years ago with the acquisition of 33 King William Street, EC4 for £62.5m.

The building was redeveloped and sold to Wells Fargo in a referendum-defying deal last July for around £300m. It is also undertaking two more major office development projects at 20 Farringdon Street, EC4 and 69 Southwark Street, SE1 and is in talks to acquire three further London development sites.

HB Reavis is aiming to have one third of its portfolio in London by the end of 2018. It currently owns assets of €2.1bn (£1.8bn) and plans for its portfolio to be 50% made up of assets within its core Central and Eastern European markets of Prague, Warsaw, Bratislava and Budapest.

A further 15% or so will be in new markets such as Berlin and it is also exploring opportunities in Turkey and Singapore.

In December the company announced it was preparing to launch a series of investment funds, including a fully seeded, core-plus, closed-end €240m Luxembourg-regulated fund that London assets could be transferred into once completed.

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